xml:lang question, markup for things like 'kursee', 'arigato'?

An xml:lang question... If I have a string that's the
transliteration of something in, say, Arabic or Japanese, do I use
xml:lang="ja" the same way as if it'd been in Japanese characters? Or is
there an idiom to indicate transliteration?

eg 'kursee' is an anglo-friendly tranliteration of the arabic
for 'chair'... what xml:lang to wrap around it?

(BTW what's the correct way to refer to these terms? 'phonetic spellings
in roman alphabet'? Or, er, latin? I get confused embarrasingly easy by
this stuff.)

Relatedly, while in Japan I bought some Japanese tourist books with glossaries of 
common English words and phrases, spelled out in hirigana. Similar use 
case to mine, which is to make language-learning Flash cards (I've
learned the 100 I bought, and would rather print my own from now on...).

It might well be that what I'm asking goes beyond the limited reach of
xml:lang, and a higher level representation is needed to capture
everything I'm trying to say. But still, I'd like to know what if
anything I ought to be saying at the xml:lang level...

thanks for any clues,

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 16 June 2004 08:40:00 UTC